> Millennial fathers have roughly tripled the amount of time they spend with kids.
I think this really undersells it. My mom parented a few hours a week. My kids (like most) lived under ceaseless 24/7 adulting. The time I spent with my sons was more like a 20x increase over my parents' generation.
Past that, it seems like it's taking forever for anyone to notice the radical changes in modern parenting/childhood. Along with eliminating adult-free peer time, we've eradicated free range areas. My generation could roam (w/o adults) for miles in every direction; my kids (like most) could go from one edge of the yard to the other (credit: car culture, trespassing culture, false stranger-danger culture).
The surprising part (to me) isn't how thoroughly adults have sabotaged kids growth opportunities, it's that nearly no one seems to have noticed it.
I'm very curious how much time you spend talking about parenting and consuming either social media or professional content about parenting, because those topics are so deeply embedded in parenting today that it's like saying "nobody seems to have noticed the internet".
Where I live in Western Australia, it is perfectly normal for 10-year-olds to be getting on their bikes and going round to their friends' houses after school.
The swing towards "Fuck Around And Find Out" parenting has been going for the last ten years here, and everybody gives you rapturous applause when you encourage kids to have their own independent playtime.
I have also never seen a man at a playground get dirty looks, in fact there are more men out with their kids than women on the weekends (fewer during weekdays).
> I'm very curious how much time you spend talking about parenting and consuming either social media or professional content about parenting,
I had minor children from the early 90s to the late 10s. Parenting discussions were pretty much an ongoing thing. When I contrasted my childhood with my kids', there would be a long pause while the other parents realize it didn't used to always be this way.
Perhaps in the last decade awareness has bloomed and for whatever reason, I'm not coming across it. I hope so. That would be great.
We’ve also eradicated the unsupervised peer socialization that kids experienced with the free range. It’s common for a child these days to only ever be around other kids in very supervised environments with adults present (play dates, school, organized activities).
Spending long chunks of time with no adults, in a large mixed-age group, is a less and less common experience.
I spent some time in a remote fishing village in Madagascar and that was one of the things that surprised me the most - kids would spend all day together in an unsupervised mob roaming around the village, from the youngest ones who were just old enough to walk independently to age 8-10 or so (older than that and you had things to do).
I agree this is a terrible loss. On the other hand, new dads are actually learning how to feel their feelings, communicate those feelings in a healthy way, and tell their children they love them.
Millennial dads were (mostly) a distant mess who for whatever reason saw the expression of feelings as "weak".
I’ve noticed that people don’t notice when the kids are free range anymore, because they’re all connected to an international network and pinging their location every minute.
> Millennials on the whole are incredibly neurotic about all kinds of things.
Truly, this hasn't been my experience. I'm GenX (edit: not GenZ), my parents were Silent Gen (WWII vets) and my kids are Millennials. My 25yo kids understand behavior and psychology better than my parents ever did.
The reason my kids grew up imprisoned is there was nowhere for them to go. The risk to their well-being was never from strangers but from cars and police.
> I'm GenZ, my parents were Silent Gen (WWII vets) and my kids are Millennials.
My understanding is that Gen Z comes AFTER millennials, so if you are Z, your kids can't be millennials. Maybe you are Gen X? Also, if your kids are 25 now, then they would be gen z, not millennials.
P.S. Don't shoot the messenger, I didn't make up this dumb system or these dumb names ^_^
I agree with everything in your top level comment.
I'm GenX, but had kids a little late, so most of my kid's friends either 1. have Millennial parents or 2. are raised by their Boomer grandparents (parents not much in the picture). The differences in how these two sets of caretakers behave is astounding. Take a typical visit from the friend to my house to play with my kid:
The friends who are with their grandparents show up. Grandpa parks his car in my driveway, and walks the kid to my door. We greet, kid runs off to play, and we shoot the shit for a while, asking how things have been going, maybe Grandpa wants to check out the latest on my woodworking project, whatever. Then Grandpa says goodbye, I'll be back later, and heads out.
The friends who are with their Millennial parents show up. Dad parks his car waaaaay out by the curb, never even going on my property. Kid gets out of the car and walks himself to my door. Dad speeds away in his car, never even acknowledging us. Dad comes back to pick the kid up, same thing. Parks way far away, texts his kid, and the kid excuses himself and runs all the way out to the car. I don't even know the names of any of my kid's friends' Millennial parents!
I'm a Millennial, and I do something much like this intentionally. I make it a point to explicitly put my kids into situations where they are responsible for themselves and are uncomfortable because of it.
The transition to adulthood was rough for me for several reasons, and looking back I think that was one of them - my parents always did things for me, but never expected me to do things on my own.
I almost certainly go overboard with this, but that's the nature of things.
Silent Americans are the most fucked up generation ever. They are the ones actually responsible for most of the bullshit that people attribute to Boomers.
I don't know if it's the parent that is neurotic so much as that it only takes 1 of 1000 assholes, who now have their little snitch device in their pocket 24/7, to call the child snatchers (CPS). And the child snatchers are legally barred from revealing who your accuser is, so the anonymous cowards can fuck up your life for weeks at no cost to themselves and with the utmost convenience. This effectively means every single person who views your child, now has veto powers on your parenting. The end result of that is people parent in the most paranoid, liability averting way possible.
When I was a kid the Karens against childhood autonomy existed but it actually cost them time and money to rat us out since they would have to drive home to a telephone, so long as we didn't play near houses. If an asshole raised hell we were gone by the time they could call the authorities.
Here's a few examples that's happened to me personally
(1) I didn't personally appear at bus stop, thinking my kid would be able to just walk the short distance from the stop to our house. Nope, school did not let kid off bus, given a timer to show up at the transportation office before child services will be called.
(2) Let my kid walk on our own property, someone drives up and starts interrogating them why they are "alone." Fortunately I was actually watching from further away and I managed to diffuse the situation before they alerted the authorities.
(3) Took my kid to the park so they could have a nice time outside in public. Whoops, looks like my child is a difference race than me. That means I am a kidnapper. Karen (from bodycam, a passing yuppie looking cyclist) calls police, who arrive and scare the shit out of me and my kid and detain us for about an hour. Not released until a woman's voice comes on the phone (they literally did not check, just any female voice) says the man can let his child play at the park. They also contacted child services of both the city of the park, and my hometown -- fortunately even though the city of the park looked like they were ready to fuck with me my hometown CPS did tell them to kick rocks and since I left town there was nothing further they could do.
I was in the process of creating a brochure about our family. It's be available at our front door, to help facilitate CPS agents on their visits. It'd have a map to the fridge and to the kids' bedrooms, the names of their schools and contact numbers for family.
All this due to a disgruntled neighbor who endlessly called cps (anonymously), with a variety of bizarre accusations. I suspect CPS got so sick of seeing us, they eventually ignored the calls.
Just a note for Dads doing more than their parents - it’s quality more than quantity. Be fully present with your kids more than trying to kill yourself fitting more hours in. That’s what matters.
Bad parenting tends to be more of the type that isn’t engaged. Kids don’t hate you for going to work. They are hurt if you come home and ignore them.
If you’re a dad and live in the same house as your kids the time comes naturally… men have been purposefully fleeing it throughout history.
So its not a matter of “killing yourself to get more time” … its a matter of not abandoning your kids and wife to make time for your hobbies or whatever
Dad and millennial here and this change has been very noticeable in my circle of friends including myself and I’m all for it. Men have been doing their share of housework too. But I will say, it’s not all dads but enough that I think this will have a positive effect on the next generation.
Im gay and because of that was disowned. My partner has a brother “K” and K has three children. Watching K show up in basic ways for his kids, like remembering what songs they like and teaching them sports is the fastest way to make me ugly cry.
Thanks to anyone reading this if you’re trying to be a good dad. You’re making the world a better place in ways you don’t even see
Woke up at 6am. Child 1 woke up at 7am. Dropped her off at daycare at 8am. All the other children were being dropped off by their dads, too. Full day of work ahead. Dinner at 6pm. Bath at 7pm. Bedtime and story at 8pm. Usually calls with Bangalore from 9pm to midnight but it's Labour Day over there. Sleep at midnight.
My one concern with this is the risk of eventual burn out + mental health issues which will have its own impact on the children. Full time career + very present parent during the weekdays might just not be possible. WFH definitely helps make it significantly more possible though.
Also worth not forgetting that in most cases the fathers of millennials were a hell of a lot more present and emotionally available than their fathers etc. I'm sure we'll make plenty of our own mistakes that our children will try to avoid when their turn comes.
Those household structures aren'tpopular, they're just common when women have no other options. I have nothing against those structures, they work great for some families. But the reality is that they often force the wife into becoming an unpaid caregiver for her in-laws (who constantly criticize how she runs the household).
I don't really understand this mindset that being at home and raising your kids is only something you do when forced to. For my family, if we had more options -- ie, more money -- then both of us would be stay-at-home parents. It's much more of a joy than going to work.
Severely missing the point here. It’s about being criticised and not recognised while doing so. It’s about lack of choice – and no, when you’re 25, you don’t know what this does to you over time. And when you finally do, it’s too late, you’re not going to run away with your kids and no job.
Except "trad" households (full time SAHM in a nuclear home) are not traditional. Tradition is not something only the upper-middle class in a post-war boom attained for a short period of time.
Throughout human history, it was rare for only two people to raise a child, let alone one. Or for women to not bring money into the home.
Like many "trad" trends, it's based more on advertising and television than history.
At the very least, you need a whole society of aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins, and deep friends to truly do any kind of traditional family structure in the traditional way. Otherwise it's just emulating an extremely narrow portion of the trad that didn't exactly exist in the first place.
> At the very least, you need a whole society of aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins, and deep friends to truly do any kind of traditional family structure in the traditional way.
"It takes a village to raise a child" was meant literally. However, the glory of capitalism required people to move to where the jobs were, turning that millennia-old principle upside down ever since industrialization. And car culture was the ultimate fatal blow, when children can't even walk their own neighborhood any more.
I remember when Hillary Clinton said "it takes a village to raise a child" and she was mocked by conservatives and accused of undermining parental rights and wanting governments to control families.
And when BLM made it part of their charter to encourage community support for children beyond the typical nuclear unit they were accused of a radical Marxist agenda to "destroy families."
For some reason the very concept of extended families and community engenders deep anger and hostility from some Americans, and that's odd for a nation of immigrants considering how common the "whole society of aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins" is in the rest of the world.
> For some reason the very concept of extended families and community engenders deep anger and hostility from some Americans
I think because excessive individualism plays into the hands of large companies. There is an individualist culture that has naturally grown over time in the US, but it has also been pushed by big corporations because if you can't depend on your neighbors and extended family, you need to spend money to fill the gaps.
But when leftists says things like community support, it doesn't bring up images of traditional villages and extended families. It brings up images of communists saying things like abolish the family. Naturally, due to their history.
It's not like leftists are known for their traditional family values now or then, so why should it be taken that way?
Yes, when you intentionally take what leftists say in bad faith and stereotype them negatively, then the bad faith interpretation and negative stereotypes make sense. But normal people don't hear "communism" when leftists say "community support."
Also given how many people espousing "traditional family values" among the right turn out to be abusers, pedophiles, rapists, deadbeats, etc, what you might consider "traditional" values don't actually mapped to the left-right political axis at all.
And I assume you didn't bother reading my comment or this thread very hard and just wanted to dunk on the left, but the American nuclear family isn't "traditional family values" to begin with.
I think this only applies to certain segments of society. My child has type 1 so I'm active on Facebook groups for parents. The number of mums who say their partner is not involved really at all in their child's care is so sad. The child's own father can't supervise their child solo because they can't manage the care. And then the divorced parents. Oh boy...
"The number of mums who say their partner is not involved really at all in their child's care is so sad."
While that can be true, I wonder how much of it is true. It's pretty common in therapy to hear partners saying the other one doesn't contribute, but further investigation can often turn up observation biases.
Without proper statistics we can't know. But I do wonder why is it that if you spend any time on parenting websites you find lots of mothers complaining about deadbeat husbands, and so few fathers complaining about deadbeat wives. Purely anecdotal, but it is very lopsided, and it has made me wonder why is it.
I'm a dad, too. The lopsidedness could come from many places: mothers being drawn to parenting websites (marketing), women feeling more compelled to voice complaints online (if they are stay-at-home-moms, they don't have coworkers to chat with), women actually getting treated unfairly (very true... patriarchy), etc.
I've heard this from many moms, "My husband does so little in terms of housework, childcare, play and mental load, that it is actually easier when he is out of the house; when he is home, I essentially have to take care of an additional child." I even know some moms that organize playdates for their husband, as in ONLY the husbands, so that that the husbands are out of the house.
On the other hand, I know of two separate marriages that fell apart because the husband worked, did all the child care and housework, while the mom stayed home and doomscrolled. After a few years of no improvement, divorce. Of course many things could be at play here... screen addiction, post-partum depression, etc.
Raising kids is complex, time-consuming, hard, and amazing. It takes a lot of energy, people, and love. I always try to assume people are doing their best, though sometimes even that's tough.
Being a deadbeat is defined as not paying. It's not about caregiving. These roles may not be equally distributed by gender, but then why is there not as much complaining by men about women not being equal partners financially? It's has to do with bias.
You can also find that much of the research about household duties is biased against the type of work that men have traditionally done (eg excluding yard work, maintenance, etc).
It depends on the site but when I was a SAHD, I found many of those parenting sites were not welcoming to dads, even dads doing the exact same work as the moms. Moms there wanted a place to vent about their husbands and men who were pulling their fair share or were handling most of the parent duties simply weren't allowed.
This, it's well known that women want to vent and men want to fix the issue. This difference in communication and perspective has been supported in various research.
It seems like a safe guess that very few of the moms complaining about their partners on r/parenting are also married to the dads who are posting on r/daddit.
It's like how /r/steak is just dudes posting steak pictures, and there is some new cooking sub where it's just women posting food pictures and complaining about their significant others. Women be complaining.
I'm not sure how serious you are about the dismissive "women be complaining" comment. A big part of your perception may be that women have more to 'complain' about; society is measurably unfair for women. Another part could be that when women voice their struggles it is called "complaining," and when men voice their struggles they are "being serious." Also, men get shot down for showing vulnerability and seeking support, so their struggles are internal. And this isn't always good for mental health.
That's the thing about trends in aggregate data. It tells very little about the details of any particular situation. There are almost certainly a wide variety of subgroups where this particular trend doesn't hold, and others where the changes are even more dramatic.
The data is reasonably reliable, at least in the view of the team that published the paper, and those who reviewed it. No one claims it is perfect.
And the post that started this sub thread was about how their experience didn’t show the trend. But no one in the social sciences expects every sample to follow the trend. There will be numerous exceptions. Just like sometimes when one rolls a pair of dice one gets a twelve.
That twelve is an absolutely an accurate sample from the data but just because one sometimes gets an outlier it doesn’t mean that there is no central tendency.
Not directly relevant to the article, but I'm curious if anyone else has connected the fact that fathers are spending more time being close with their children at the same time average global testosterone levels have dropped without a solid explanation?
To be clear, I'm not trying to point a causal arrow here, or even say it's good or bad. I read a study the other day that asserted that fathers who spent more time parenting have measurably lower testosterone levels, and that the delta correlates to the amount of time spent.
> testosterone levels have dropped without a solid explanation
There is a solid explanation.
First, before the adoption of mass spec, studies used a less accurate method of measuring testosterone that overstated testosterone levels.
Also, the studies showing the population level decline in testosterone generally controlled for obesity (which naturally lowers testosterone) using BMI. But BMI is a very crude measure.
When studies control with better methods like BMI + waist circumference, and only compare samples using the mass spec measurement method, the unexplained population level decline goes away. After fixing the measurement method, what remains of the decline can be explained by BMI + waist circumference. In other words, modern men are more prone to obesity and metabolic syndrome, which naturally reduces testosterone. Case closed.
That study appears to be US only, while global studies have shown the effect.
For that matter, some _animal_ studies have shown declining testosterone as well. That doesn't seem to be well-studied, but if it holds up it would make me lean toward it being something environmental (e.g. microplastic pollution)
I linked that study because it is particularly interesting because they run the mass spec test on archived blood samples.
But there are other studies and meta analyses which cover other countries and come to the same conclusion.
I think many of the studies claiming to find significant population level decline are older and overstate the issue due to the methodological errors outlined in my previous post. If you are thinking of a particular one, please share a link.
I am not familiar with the research on testosterone levels in animals. In humans, while not conclusory, I do think the evidence suggests that increasing rates of obesity and metabolic syndrome are the proximate cause of testosterone decline.
It's a good article and, as a father, I experience and certify what it says. It presents the causes of the main observed fact (more time for kids) which happens anywhere in the Western world at least. But it can't go further and explain what general social changes cause all that. For me, in no order, they are:
Financial strains (family disposable income, high cost of living, wealth inequality)
Expand of electronic device use (from TVs to modern ones) and their apps
Convergence of gender roles, making males less masculine
General loss of classical values, promotion of easy life, short term goals and superficial qualities leading to misery and deactivation
It isn’t said in this article, but as an elder millennial and a guy that’s talked about this exact thing with peers, it’s that we don’t want to repeat the mistakes of our parents. Boomers, the parents of millennials, are perhaps the worst generation to have ever existed and we carry a lot of baggage over it.
We were latchkey kids. The key to the house door was tied around our neck using a shoelace. When the street lights came on, it meant going home. Both parents worked to afford the house and the kids' expenses.
I can't help but wonder about the relationship between fathers (and, in fact, all parents) spending more time with their children, and people choosing to have fewer children, and later.
I think it's unquestionably true that fathers spending more time with their children is, on the whole, much better for those children.
But it's also true that it's a huge problem for society that people are having fewer children. And I think you can make a reasonable argument that increasing expectations around the quality of parenting are party of that trend.
Ugh... In the 90s, people were screaming and panicking about the future of over-population. Dystopian scenes of dense and dirty tiny living-quarters stacked on top of each other.
Now everyone's screaming about a declining population.
We should embrace and prepare for degrowth for a better chance at a wonderful future, not shout at the sky hoping people will make more babies for the economy.
And guess what, if we prepare for degrowth, where a generation or two or three of the entire planet never goes hungry, never goes to war, and has the freedom of movement, creativity, innovation, interaction... Those people will want to have many many babies, and we can once again start worrying about overpopulation.
If fathers spending more time with their children is better for the children but worse for ~~society~~the economy, is that really even a question worth considering?
I think it is. It's discouraged and unspoken, but a lot of men don't like spending time with children. I mean for weeks or months, sure, but when you have a kid it drags on for years 24/7 and nothing but having your own child will really reveal to you how that turns out for you.
As it turns out, I don't enjoy extended time with children. My bad, but I power through it for the sake of the child. In older times that would be no problem, my wife would deal with that. Instead I stopped at 1 when I realized I am not the kind of person who enjoys being equally involved with children.
In the same way you power through taking care of your kids, not because you enjoy it but because you prioritize their well-being, how likely is it that moms are generally doing the same? It seems to me like men have been historically avoiding this child-rearing responsibility, moreso than women enjoying doing so.
I can tell you that my wife and I are both exhausted of taking care of them 24/7. It is not something we do for funsies.
the question is, where does that feeling come from? from your own time growing up, based on how your own father interacted with you? from your friends/peers? others?
i can relate. when my kids were young i didn't know what to do with them. but it's not that i didn't like spending time with them. before we had kids, working part-time so i could spend a lot of time at home was my dream. it was what i wanted. when the dream became real my inability to initiate play with the children was unexpected.
i figure it was because i had no rolemodels from my time growing up, no childhood experience that i could replicate because i grew up with a single dad who wasn't as close to me as i wanted to. every interaction was initiated by my children. it got easier as they got older because our interests became more compatible. (we could play games together that i also enjoyed, etc)
all the other stuff, taking care of them, feeding, putting them to sleep, etc. was easy because it's clear what needs to be done. and it wasn't/isn't exhausting either. i relish every interaction and moments of success where we achieve something together.
I can tell you that as you have more children the time you can spend and need to spend drops - because there’s more of them, but they also play with each other.
Three are running around yelling and I can’t even join in, as they want me to be “the base” apparently.
I can't believe I'm asking this, because it isn't even something I would remotely consider (and it is too late anyway), but, is three actually easier than two children in some ways?
I have two children and I find parenting to be utterly draining. They are 4 and 6. They are *constantly* fighting. They play together a bit, but when they do, after 5-10 minutes it leads to real fight where we need to intervene. And they still demand an enormous amount of attention.
It turns out I am one of those fathers with a personality that doesn't deal well with constant sensory overload. I was medicated for ADHD myself as a child and one of my children is AuADHD. It isn't his fault and we're trying to find ways to help him (and everyone else), but his meltdowns make life so, so hard for the whole family. He wants to control and dominate every situation, whether it is his brother or his parents.
I was wondering if the dynamics of three would have made it easier because he couldn't dominate his brother so eaily, or if that would just mean he became the isolated child.
It ... can? It really depends on the children, the dynamics, and other factors (so I'm not saying "have another kid and everything is fixed").
It does increase the network, so that if one kid doesn't want to play, the other might. Sometimes all the kids are playing together, sometimes one is off doing his own thing, sometimes there's still a meltdown.
Three might be the nadir as they outnumber you but each kid only has two other kids. But when older you likely can deal with one kid at a time and the other two play.
If it makes you feel better 4 to 6 is about the worst for "normal" kids, too, as they know that the outside world is something they have influence over but can't always control the way they want to.
My mom left the house as a kid. Dad worked and did it all during the week. Definitely felt like this was a rare thing growing up. I did spend time with my mom on the weekend though.
As a father I try and balance it out but I definitely don’t do as much as my dad did growing up.
> I don’t know who told MacRumors what (and their sourcing is just “MacRumors has learned”), but I know for a fact that it is not true that the teams working on the Vision platform have “been redistributed to other teams within Apple.”
Good to know! I thought it was a bit weird for the team to have been disbanded so abruptly. Perhaps if this aspect of the story is not correct, other aspects will turn out to have been untrue as well.
It is also kind of forced. Modern industrial society wants to extract as much productivity out of workforce as possible. What that means is in 1965 one income was able to sustain a household but now we need two incomes. There is no dedicated support for kids now so fathers have to give up time and mothers have to exchange child-mother bonding time from kids to the company.
The real benefiter of this is the capitalist who can now have twice the workforce at the price of one.
How about we start paying market price to the parent who takes care of the kids irrespective of mothers or fathers ? Investing in next generation is way more important than making useless widgets faster.
My spouse and I are single-income and I still try. It's not about economic output, but rather there are things I want my son to know that I can only teach him by being present in his life.
> How about we start paying market price to the parent who takes care of the kids irrespective of mothers or fathers ? Investing in next generation is way more important than making useless widgets faster.
Considering that the current political majority in the US wants people to have more kids, this would be a really reasonable thing to do if they were serious about that.
I help with my kid a lot, and I'm remote so I do it around the clock. I take contact naps, change every diaper, watch her for periods of time so my wife is free.
my wife doesn't work. and she didn't work before we had a baby. because one of our salaries was enough, so instead we work less. and again due to remote work, work has barely been top 5 in my life focus areas for the last decade.
In the 1950s, fathers worked and paid for everything. Mothers raised the kids. This was taught in schools, girls were steered into marriage, motherhood, and housekeeping and men into vocations or college.
Let's not pretend that many women didn't go to work so they could have more, and feel like they were a more complete person. Many people just don't want to be pigeonholed into roles defined by tradition, and the 1960s were a huge rebellion against this. This wasn't some grand capitalist scheme.
It's still possible to raise a family on one professional income, if you live like most people did in the 1960s. Can you do it on minimum wage? No, but you couldn't do it then either.
Don’t imagine that it wasn’t heavily promoted by industrialites after they saw that after ww2 they could increase the labor force by 30 percent without paying more than they were before.
Everything that starts out with a few well meaning people is, especially now, immediately turned into an astroturfing campaign to fuel some specific economic or political (is there really a difference?) end.
Have to disagree as a father. The real benefit is the father and child who are now bonding. That doesn't mean the mother can't also bond, it just means it's not one sided.
I got to spend a bit more than 2 years doing math homework 1:1 with my youngest. Now, she's moving up to honors & gets 100% without any help. I miss all that time we got to hang out, do homework, watch videos of cats, etc.
Except if anyone bothered to read the damn article you'd see that the research showed the highly educated were more likely to have involved fathers. Those are not going to be forced as the person seems to imply.
The benefit comes from women being able to work, not from each household needing two incomes to raise kids. When a woman needs two incomes to raise her kids that means there is still a significant obstacle to leaving their partner.
> The real benefiter of this is the capitalist ...
Tired old socialist rhetoric.
The real benefiter of this is the state which can now have many times the tax base at the price of none. Where women used to take care of the children and do the housekeeping those tasks are now often done by paid day care, taxed by the state and paid help, again taxed by the state. From a single tax payer a family - father, mother, two children - now supplies two tax payers and several 'downstream' tax payers.
It's hilarious how the government used Rosy the Riveter to convince women that being liberated is slaving away building death machines for the state to literally blow up all our money, while sending your kids to people who don't give two fucks for them, all while moving all that domestic stuff to the GDP so they can tax the shit out of it.
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Yes, it’s not the capitalists making trillions from the free doubling of labor supply, it’s the politicians taking their 10%…
Its kind of shocking after having an infant myself and hearing from his grandparents how little my wife and I's fathers did. One never changed a diaper and has never cooked dinner and the other looked like he had never held a baby in his life despite having 3 kids. I can't imagine not being incredibly hands on and involved.
There’s often been a “kids are mom’s until they’re dad’s” thing going on - dads do whatever with babies and younger children but the older children get heavily involved.
Of course, 50+ years ago diaper changing was often skilled labor (as was cooking) - it’s much easier to change a modern diaper and cook a modern ready-to-make meal.
I feel there is a trend of not fully appreciating what fathers who spend less time with kids actually do. I think that's unfair, frankly. Many of them do things that contribute to the family in other ways.
What was my Dad busy doing? Focusing on his career in order to provide for his family. Doing hobbies that increased his skill set. Fixing the house to ensure we all had a nice safe place to live. Tending to the garden to keep the neighbours happy. Building ties with the community to increase our family's standing in the community and being able to call in favours in emergencies etc.
The 4 days off he had from his primary job, he worked multiple other jobs, creating multiple streams of family income.
It's so easy to view many of these things as him not tending to his family directly. That's incredibly short-sighted.
My mother appreciated very little of those things, and constantly nagged that he never did enough. She admitted many years later this was a big contributor to their divorce.
I think some modern opinions of parenting come from a very individualistic, transactional and reciprocal mindset. Eg "I spend 1 hour doing the dishes, you have to do something, today, and of equivalent value, to show you love us". What kind of foundation for a relationship is that? What happened to the power of a family?
I think you have a point: many men work hard to provide stability for their family, and are effectively sacrificing family time to provide that. This kind of hard work feels undervalued in modern parenting discourse, which seems to put most value on time directly spent with children or on direct day-to-day tasks (dishes, cooking, etc).
An example anecdote: my friend works construction. Lots of long hours of hard labor. His wife is unhappy because he doesn't do more childcare, but left unanswered is how he could do more. He can't work fewer hours or move to a new job without a giant income hit. His wife can't earn enough to offset daycare costs. They already live on a fairly thin budget. From the outside, I can see how he'd feel unappreciated.
That said though there are definitely also men who aren't doing childcare OR working hard, and they're happy to have their wife do everything.
Often there’s unsaid things that have “comparative” simple solutions - not working less but getting the wife a few hours a week “off duty” kind of things.
> The fact that richer and better-educated parents are freely choosing to pour more of their valuable time into childcare makes raising children sound practically like a “luxury good,” akin to buying a Rolex watch or a fragile Fabergé egg.
It kind of reflected an unawareness to me. Unless one crosses the threshold of wealth where they can afford full-time 24/7 nanny, the richer parents spending more time in childcare seems obvious and non-counterintuitive. It is more likely jobs that pay well also provide flexible working hours and locations so these parents can really afford to spend more time in childcare. And this would much more prevalent category then families who could afford hired help for child care.
On the other hand poorer parent with much stringent job conditions would be mentally and physically exhausted to provide much childcare.
> I think some modern opinions of parenting come from a very individualistic, transactional and reciprocal mindset. ..
I think family unit like almost every other thing in modern economy has fallen victim to financialization of society.
Strongly agree. I know so many men who are the sole provider for their families and their wives are unhappy about how things like childcare and household chores aren’t split more fairly, but they seem to have zero appreciation for the crushing burden of financially supporting a family for decades. It’s hard, stressful, and wears you down. Almost all of the stay at home moms I know get more sleep, more exercise, and more social time than their husbands do, once the kids are old enough for school.
I’ve also now watched many friends divorce, and I have to say, the wives who stayed at home seem to struggle a LOT more with the transition of now having to parent AND have a job, and the husbands mostly seem to be fine. And that’s despite them now paying a big chunk of their ex’s bills!
> but they seem to have zero appreciation for the crushing burden of financially supporting a family for decades. It’s hard, stressful, and wears you down.
Absolutely. They will though, when two parents working fully becomes a requirement instead of an option, as we are seeing in many HCOL areas. Or even, as many wish, to be the primary earner and the man stay at home.
In fact, the burden on the sole earner as you point out, is /increasing/ during this transition - costs are rising due to the expectation that two people will contribute financially to the mortgage and other expenses. Another issue that women don't tend to appreciate.
At that point, neither parent can catch a break, and the family and children suffer.
But this equality of opportunity is exactly what women fought extremely hard for. It's a shame that marriage and the kids are sometimes the victims of the side effects.
(I'm gay fwiw and not a misogynist. I do root for women's rights but not blindly. Demanding massive societal change comes with responsibilities)
Second sibling born - turns out I didn't get to be the parent, I get to look after the parents. I'm tired, exhausted, utterly miserable, barely scraping by. All those fancy ideals I thought old age provided for don't exist. Nursing homes? Hah, that's $340 a day up here in the middle of nowhere. I ain't making that a day. I get to do it myself.
I wonder what percentage of folks are now stuck in caretaking instead of raising their own families themselves. I basically predict my family line is extinct after my generation.
> Millennial fathers have roughly tripled the amount of time they spend with kids.
I think this really undersells it. My mom parented a few hours a week. My kids (like most) lived under ceaseless 24/7 adulting. The time I spent with my sons was more like a 20x increase over my parents' generation.
Past that, it seems like it's taking forever for anyone to notice the radical changes in modern parenting/childhood. Along with eliminating adult-free peer time, we've eradicated free range areas. My generation could roam (w/o adults) for miles in every direction; my kids (like most) could go from one edge of the yard to the other (credit: car culture, trespassing culture, false stranger-danger culture).
The surprising part (to me) isn't how thoroughly adults have sabotaged kids growth opportunities, it's that nearly no one seems to have noticed it.
> nearly no one seems to have noticed it.
I'm very curious how much time you spend talking about parenting and consuming either social media or professional content about parenting, because those topics are so deeply embedded in parenting today that it's like saying "nobody seems to have noticed the internet".
Indeed. _everyone_ has noticed it. Nobody really has any plan to fix it. IMO the urbanism movement comes closest to having some practical plans.
Where I live in Western Australia, it is perfectly normal for 10-year-olds to be getting on their bikes and going round to their friends' houses after school.
The swing towards "Fuck Around And Find Out" parenting has been going for the last ten years here, and everybody gives you rapturous applause when you encourage kids to have their own independent playtime.
I have also never seen a man at a playground get dirty looks, in fact there are more men out with their kids than women on the weekends (fewer during weekdays).
> I'm very curious how much time you spend talking about parenting and consuming either social media or professional content about parenting,
I had minor children from the early 90s to the late 10s. Parenting discussions were pretty much an ongoing thing. When I contrasted my childhood with my kids', there would be a long pause while the other parents realize it didn't used to always be this way.
Perhaps in the last decade awareness has bloomed and for whatever reason, I'm not coming across it. I hope so. That would be great.
We’ve also eradicated the unsupervised peer socialization that kids experienced with the free range. It’s common for a child these days to only ever be around other kids in very supervised environments with adults present (play dates, school, organized activities).
Spending long chunks of time with no adults, in a large mixed-age group, is a less and less common experience.
I spent some time in a remote fishing village in Madagascar and that was one of the things that surprised me the most - kids would spend all day together in an unsupervised mob roaming around the village, from the youngest ones who were just old enough to walk independently to age 8-10 or so (older than that and you had things to do).
I also enjoyed this essay on the topic: https://unpublishablepapers.substack.com/p/where-do-the-chil...
I agree this is a terrible loss. On the other hand, new dads are actually learning how to feel their feelings, communicate those feelings in a healthy way, and tell their children they love them.
Millennial dads were (mostly) a distant mess who for whatever reason saw the expression of feelings as "weak".
I just realized I completely missed the grammar on this one: I meant dads of millenials.
I’ve noticed that people don’t notice when the kids are free range anymore, because they’re all connected to an international network and pinging their location every minute.
Millennials on the whole are incredibly neurotic about all kinds of things. Why that is is a matter of debate.
> Millennials on the whole are incredibly neurotic about all kinds of things.
Truly, this hasn't been my experience. I'm GenX (edit: not GenZ), my parents were Silent Gen (WWII vets) and my kids are Millennials. My 25yo kids understand behavior and psychology better than my parents ever did.
The reason my kids grew up imprisoned is there was nowhere for them to go. The risk to their well-being was never from strangers but from cars and police.
> I'm GenZ, my parents were Silent Gen (WWII vets) and my kids are Millennials.
My understanding is that Gen Z comes AFTER millennials, so if you are Z, your kids can't be millennials. Maybe you are Gen X? Also, if your kids are 25 now, then they would be gen z, not millennials.
P.S. Don't shoot the messenger, I didn't make up this dumb system or these dumb names ^_^
I agree with everything in your top level comment.
> My understanding is that Gen Z comes AFTER millennials,
You're right. I fat fingered my post.
25yo is solid GenZ
You probably meant GenX.
Millennials seem to have their shit together more than any generation since the silent generation, at least in the UK.
I'm GenX, but had kids a little late, so most of my kid's friends either 1. have Millennial parents or 2. are raised by their Boomer grandparents (parents not much in the picture). The differences in how these two sets of caretakers behave is astounding. Take a typical visit from the friend to my house to play with my kid:
The friends who are with their grandparents show up. Grandpa parks his car in my driveway, and walks the kid to my door. We greet, kid runs off to play, and we shoot the shit for a while, asking how things have been going, maybe Grandpa wants to check out the latest on my woodworking project, whatever. Then Grandpa says goodbye, I'll be back later, and heads out.
The friends who are with their Millennial parents show up. Dad parks his car waaaaay out by the curb, never even going on my property. Kid gets out of the car and walks himself to my door. Dad speeds away in his car, never even acknowledging us. Dad comes back to pick the kid up, same thing. Parks way far away, texts his kid, and the kid excuses himself and runs all the way out to the car. I don't even know the names of any of my kid's friends' Millennial parents!
This pattern repeats across N = about 6.
I'm a Millennial, and I do something much like this intentionally. I make it a point to explicitly put my kids into situations where they are responsible for themselves and are uncomfortable because of it.
The transition to adulthood was rough for me for several reasons, and looking back I think that was one of them - my parents always did things for me, but never expected me to do things on my own.
I almost certainly go overboard with this, but that's the nature of things.
Silent Americans are the most fucked up generation ever. They are the ones actually responsible for most of the bullshit that people attribute to Boomers.
Just wait til GenX is elderly.
The things, grandparents are more neurotic. Just had less options.
I don't know if it's the parent that is neurotic so much as that it only takes 1 of 1000 assholes, who now have their little snitch device in their pocket 24/7, to call the child snatchers (CPS). And the child snatchers are legally barred from revealing who your accuser is, so the anonymous cowards can fuck up your life for weeks at no cost to themselves and with the utmost convenience. This effectively means every single person who views your child, now has veto powers on your parenting. The end result of that is people parent in the most paranoid, liability averting way possible.
When I was a kid the Karens against childhood autonomy existed but it actually cost them time and money to rat us out since they would have to drive home to a telephone, so long as we didn't play near houses. If an asshole raised hell we were gone by the time they could call the authorities.
The actual threat of CPS 8s grossly exagerrated here. And the fear is one of the symptoms.
Here's a few examples that's happened to me personally
(1) I didn't personally appear at bus stop, thinking my kid would be able to just walk the short distance from the stop to our house. Nope, school did not let kid off bus, given a timer to show up at the transportation office before child services will be called.
(2) Let my kid walk on our own property, someone drives up and starts interrogating them why they are "alone." Fortunately I was actually watching from further away and I managed to diffuse the situation before they alerted the authorities.
(3) Took my kid to the park so they could have a nice time outside in public. Whoops, looks like my child is a difference race than me. That means I am a kidnapper. Karen (from bodycam, a passing yuppie looking cyclist) calls police, who arrive and scare the shit out of me and my kid and detain us for about an hour. Not released until a woman's voice comes on the phone (they literally did not check, just any female voice) says the man can let his child play at the park. They also contacted child services of both the city of the park, and my hometown -- fortunately even though the city of the park looked like they were ready to fuck with me my hometown CPS did tell them to kick rocks and since I left town there was nothing further they could do.
Holy shit. I'm so sorry that this happened to you. That's not right.
I've had CPS call me up and question me about about play someone observed through a window.
It's a real thing.
I was in the process of creating a brochure about our family. It's be available at our front door, to help facilitate CPS agents on their visits. It'd have a map to the fridge and to the kids' bedrooms, the names of their schools and contact numbers for family.
All this due to a disgruntled neighbor who endlessly called cps (anonymously), with a variety of bizarre accusations. I suspect CPS got so sick of seeing us, they eventually ignored the calls.
Just a note for Dads doing more than their parents - it’s quality more than quantity. Be fully present with your kids more than trying to kill yourself fitting more hours in. That’s what matters.
Bad parenting tends to be more of the type that isn’t engaged. Kids don’t hate you for going to work. They are hurt if you come home and ignore them.
If you’re a dad and live in the same house as your kids the time comes naturally… men have been purposefully fleeing it throughout history.
So its not a matter of “killing yourself to get more time” … its a matter of not abandoning your kids and wife to make time for your hobbies or whatever
Yeah, what's the point in technically spending more time with kids if half of that time you stare at your mobile phone.
Dad and millennial here and this change has been very noticeable in my circle of friends including myself and I’m all for it. Men have been doing their share of housework too. But I will say, it’s not all dads but enough that I think this will have a positive effect on the next generation.
Im gay and because of that was disowned. My partner has a brother “K” and K has three children. Watching K show up in basic ways for his kids, like remembering what songs they like and teaching them sports is the fastest way to make me ugly cry.
Thanks to anyone reading this if you’re trying to be a good dad. You’re making the world a better place in ways you don’t even see
Yup.
Woke up at 6am. Child 1 woke up at 7am. Dropped her off at daycare at 8am. All the other children were being dropped off by their dads, too. Full day of work ahead. Dinner at 6pm. Bath at 7pm. Bedtime and story at 8pm. Usually calls with Bangalore from 9pm to midnight but it's Labour Day over there. Sleep at midnight.
Rinse. Repeat.
My one concern with this is the risk of eventual burn out + mental health issues which will have its own impact on the children. Full time career + very present parent during the weekdays might just not be possible. WFH definitely helps make it significantly more possible though.
Also worth not forgetting that in most cases the fathers of millennials were a hell of a lot more present and emotionally available than their fathers etc. I'm sure we'll make plenty of our own mistakes that our children will try to avoid when their turn comes.
> Full time career + very present parent during the weekdays might just not be possible.
Guess why birth rates are crashing - and why they crash hardest in Asia, especially Japan.
And guess why trad household structures are (still) popular in some circles
Those household structures aren'tpopular, they're just common when women have no other options. I have nothing against those structures, they work great for some families. But the reality is that they often force the wife into becoming an unpaid caregiver for her in-laws (who constantly criticize how she runs the household).
I don't really understand this mindset that being at home and raising your kids is only something you do when forced to. For my family, if we had more options -- ie, more money -- then both of us would be stay-at-home parents. It's much more of a joy than going to work.
So confidently stated! My wife had ludicrous options and chose it — what draws you to this conclusion?
Parent said often, not always. Counter examples is an anecdote.
I would like to see good statistics on this.
And your wife’s opinion on her choices.
The counter example my be anecdotal, but the original claim is also baseless. It's not anecdote vs data, it's anecdote vs nothing.
It's 2026. Barring severe manipulation/abuse, why would you choose to get married and have children if you're a woman who doesn't want to raise them?
Severely missing the point here. It’s about being criticised and not recognised while doing so. It’s about lack of choice – and no, when you’re 25, you don’t know what this does to you over time. And when you finally do, it’s too late, you’re not going to run away with your kids and no job.
Completely absurd, most good looking, well-educated Eastern European women with a plenty of options would disagree with you.
Your comment seems to imply that they’re stupid.
Except "trad" households (full time SAHM in a nuclear home) are not traditional. Tradition is not something only the upper-middle class in a post-war boom attained for a short period of time.
Throughout human history, it was rare for only two people to raise a child, let alone one. Or for women to not bring money into the home.
Like many "trad" trends, it's based more on advertising and television than history.
At the very least, you need a whole society of aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins, and deep friends to truly do any kind of traditional family structure in the traditional way. Otherwise it's just emulating an extremely narrow portion of the trad that didn't exactly exist in the first place.
> At the very least, you need a whole society of aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins, and deep friends to truly do any kind of traditional family structure in the traditional way.
"It takes a village to raise a child" was meant literally. However, the glory of capitalism required people to move to where the jobs were, turning that millennia-old principle upside down ever since industrialization. And car culture was the ultimate fatal blow, when children can't even walk their own neighborhood any more.
I remember when Hillary Clinton said "it takes a village to raise a child" and she was mocked by conservatives and accused of undermining parental rights and wanting governments to control families.
And when BLM made it part of their charter to encourage community support for children beyond the typical nuclear unit they were accused of a radical Marxist agenda to "destroy families."
For some reason the very concept of extended families and community engenders deep anger and hostility from some Americans, and that's odd for a nation of immigrants considering how common the "whole society of aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins" is in the rest of the world.
> For some reason the very concept of extended families and community engenders deep anger and hostility from some Americans
I think because excessive individualism plays into the hands of large companies. There is an individualist culture that has naturally grown over time in the US, but it has also been pushed by big corporations because if you can't depend on your neighbors and extended family, you need to spend money to fill the gaps.
But when leftists says things like community support, it doesn't bring up images of traditional villages and extended families. It brings up images of communists saying things like abolish the family. Naturally, due to their history.
It's not like leftists are known for their traditional family values now or then, so why should it be taken that way?
Yes, when you intentionally take what leftists say in bad faith and stereotype them negatively, then the bad faith interpretation and negative stereotypes make sense. But normal people don't hear "communism" when leftists say "community support."
Also given how many people espousing "traditional family values" among the right turn out to be abusers, pedophiles, rapists, deadbeats, etc, what you might consider "traditional" values don't actually mapped to the left-right political axis at all.
And I assume you didn't bother reading my comment or this thread very hard and just wanted to dunk on the left, but the American nuclear family isn't "traditional family values" to begin with.
They are way more popular among men then women. The thing is, women were mostly living that ... it is new only for men
What do you mean?
And it’s great.
I think this only applies to certain segments of society. My child has type 1 so I'm active on Facebook groups for parents. The number of mums who say their partner is not involved really at all in their child's care is so sad. The child's own father can't supervise their child solo because they can't manage the care. And then the divorced parents. Oh boy...
"The number of mums who say their partner is not involved really at all in their child's care is so sad."
While that can be true, I wonder how much of it is true. It's pretty common in therapy to hear partners saying the other one doesn't contribute, but further investigation can often turn up observation biases.
Without proper statistics we can't know. But I do wonder why is it that if you spend any time on parenting websites you find lots of mothers complaining about deadbeat husbands, and so few fathers complaining about deadbeat wives. Purely anecdotal, but it is very lopsided, and it has made me wonder why is it.
I am a dad, FWIW.
I'm a dad, too. The lopsidedness could come from many places: mothers being drawn to parenting websites (marketing), women feeling more compelled to voice complaints online (if they are stay-at-home-moms, they don't have coworkers to chat with), women actually getting treated unfairly (very true... patriarchy), etc.
I've heard this from many moms, "My husband does so little in terms of housework, childcare, play and mental load, that it is actually easier when he is out of the house; when he is home, I essentially have to take care of an additional child." I even know some moms that organize playdates for their husband, as in ONLY the husbands, so that that the husbands are out of the house.
On the other hand, I know of two separate marriages that fell apart because the husband worked, did all the child care and housework, while the mom stayed home and doomscrolled. After a few years of no improvement, divorce. Of course many things could be at play here... screen addiction, post-partum depression, etc.
Raising kids is complex, time-consuming, hard, and amazing. It takes a lot of energy, people, and love. I always try to assume people are doing their best, though sometimes even that's tough.
Being a deadbeat is defined as not paying. It's not about caregiving. These roles may not be equally distributed by gender, but then why is there not as much complaining by men about women not being equal partners financially? It's has to do with bias.
You can also find that much of the research about household duties is biased against the type of work that men have traditionally done (eg excluding yard work, maintenance, etc).
> Being a deadbeat is defined as not paying. It's not about caregiving
Merriam-Webster disagrees [0][1][2].
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/deadbeat
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/loafer
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/idler
Re. your other points, I don't entirely disagree with them, but they are at best tangential to the article we are discussing.
It depends on the site but when I was a SAHD, I found many of those parenting sites were not welcoming to dads, even dads doing the exact same work as the moms. Moms there wanted a place to vent about their husbands and men who were pulling their fair share or were handling most of the parent duties simply weren't allowed.
This, it's well known that women want to vent and men want to fix the issue. This difference in communication and perspective has been supported in various research.
That is your bias talking.
The reseach says otherwise. https://couplestherapyinc.com/why-women-complain-and-why-men...
one of the better places I found found was Daddit on reddit, though I haven't been in a while.
I found that /r/daddit was full of pictures of dads with infants.
On the other hand, /r/parenting was full of moms desperate because their partners didn't to their part.
It really paints a picture, if you think about it.
It seems like a safe guess that very few of the moms complaining about their partners on r/parenting are also married to the dads who are posting on r/daddit.
It's like how /r/steak is just dudes posting steak pictures, and there is some new cooking sub where it's just women posting food pictures and complaining about their significant others. Women be complaining.
I'm not sure how serious you are about the dismissive "women be complaining" comment. A big part of your perception may be that women have more to 'complain' about; society is measurably unfair for women. Another part could be that when women voice their struggles it is called "complaining," and when men voice their struggles they are "being serious." Also, men get shot down for showing vulnerability and seeking support, so their struggles are internal. And this isn't always good for mental health.
If someone is saying on Facebook it must be true.
That's the thing about trends in aggregate data. It tells very little about the details of any particular situation. There are almost certainly a wide variety of subgroups where this particular trend doesn't hold, and others where the changes are even more dramatic.
But the aggregate trend is quite clear.
Isn't the point that there is no way to get reliable data on this?
How would aggregation of unreliable data help?
The data is reasonably reliable, at least in the view of the team that published the paper, and those who reviewed it. No one claims it is perfect.
And the post that started this sub thread was about how their experience didn’t show the trend. But no one in the social sciences expects every sample to follow the trend. There will be numerous exceptions. Just like sometimes when one rolls a pair of dice one gets a twelve.
That twelve is an absolutely an accurate sample from the data but just because one sometimes gets an outlier it doesn’t mean that there is no central tendency.
As a GenX dad and now grandfather, I couldn't be happier to read this.
Every dad wants his sons to be a better father than he was. Glad to see it happening.
Nothing strengthens the knees like the weight of responsibility.
Yeah the weight of housing could be a little less though :)
Makes me think of this clip from Bob Odenkirk: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MNhpnEczGQA
Not directly relevant to the article, but I'm curious if anyone else has connected the fact that fathers are spending more time being close with their children at the same time average global testosterone levels have dropped without a solid explanation?
To be clear, I'm not trying to point a causal arrow here, or even say it's good or bad. I read a study the other day that asserted that fathers who spent more time parenting have measurably lower testosterone levels, and that the delta correlates to the amount of time spent.
> testosterone levels have dropped without a solid explanation
There is a solid explanation.
First, before the adoption of mass spec, studies used a less accurate method of measuring testosterone that overstated testosterone levels.
Also, the studies showing the population level decline in testosterone generally controlled for obesity (which naturally lowers testosterone) using BMI. But BMI is a very crude measure.
When studies control with better methods like BMI + waist circumference, and only compare samples using the mass spec measurement method, the unexplained population level decline goes away. After fixing the measurement method, what remains of the decline can be explained by BMI + waist circumference. In other words, modern men are more prone to obesity and metabolic syndrome, which naturally reduces testosterone. Case closed.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22150314/
That study appears to be US only, while global studies have shown the effect.
For that matter, some _animal_ studies have shown declining testosterone as well. That doesn't seem to be well-studied, but if it holds up it would make me lean toward it being something environmental (e.g. microplastic pollution)
I linked that study because it is particularly interesting because they run the mass spec test on archived blood samples.
But there are other studies and meta analyses which cover other countries and come to the same conclusion.
I think many of the studies claiming to find significant population level decline are older and overstate the issue due to the methodological errors outlined in my previous post. If you are thinking of a particular one, please share a link.
I am not familiar with the research on testosterone levels in animals. In humans, while not conclusory, I do think the evidence suggests that increasing rates of obesity and metabolic syndrome are the proximate cause of testosterone decline.
If that's the case, that's not a bad thing. Maybe men who aren't properly bonded with their kids have higher than normal testosterone for some reason?
It's a good article and, as a father, I experience and certify what it says. It presents the causes of the main observed fact (more time for kids) which happens anywhere in the Western world at least. But it can't go further and explain what general social changes cause all that. For me, in no order, they are:
Financial strains (family disposable income, high cost of living, wealth inequality)
Expand of electronic device use (from TVs to modern ones) and their apps
Convergence of gender roles, making males less masculine
General loss of classical values, promotion of easy life, short term goals and superficial qualities leading to misery and deactivation
It isn’t said in this article, but as an elder millennial and a guy that’s talked about this exact thing with peers, it’s that we don’t want to repeat the mistakes of our parents. Boomers, the parents of millennials, are perhaps the worst generation to have ever existed and we carry a lot of baggage over it.
We were latchkey kids. The key to the house door was tied around our neck using a shoelace. When the street lights came on, it meant going home. Both parents worked to afford the house and the kids' expenses.
I can't help but wonder about the relationship between fathers (and, in fact, all parents) spending more time with their children, and people choosing to have fewer children, and later.
I think it's unquestionably true that fathers spending more time with their children is, on the whole, much better for those children.
But it's also true that it's a huge problem for society that people are having fewer children. And I think you can make a reasonable argument that increasing expectations around the quality of parenting are party of that trend.
Ugh... In the 90s, people were screaming and panicking about the future of over-population. Dystopian scenes of dense and dirty tiny living-quarters stacked on top of each other.
Now everyone's screaming about a declining population.
We should embrace and prepare for degrowth for a better chance at a wonderful future, not shout at the sky hoping people will make more babies for the economy.
And guess what, if we prepare for degrowth, where a generation or two or three of the entire planet never goes hungry, never goes to war, and has the freedom of movement, creativity, innovation, interaction... Those people will want to have many many babies, and we can once again start worrying about overpopulation.
If fathers spending more time with their children is better for the children but worse for ~~society~~the economy, is that really even a question worth considering?
Screw the economy, love your kid (or kids).
Well it is worth considering. Unless one think they and their children can just exist beyond space and time of where society, economy exist.
I think it is. It's discouraged and unspoken, but a lot of men don't like spending time with children. I mean for weeks or months, sure, but when you have a kid it drags on for years 24/7 and nothing but having your own child will really reveal to you how that turns out for you.
As it turns out, I don't enjoy extended time with children. My bad, but I power through it for the sake of the child. In older times that would be no problem, my wife would deal with that. Instead I stopped at 1 when I realized I am not the kind of person who enjoys being equally involved with children.
In the same way you power through taking care of your kids, not because you enjoy it but because you prioritize their well-being, how likely is it that moms are generally doing the same? It seems to me like men have been historically avoiding this child-rearing responsibility, moreso than women enjoying doing so.
I can tell you that my wife and I are both exhausted of taking care of them 24/7. It is not something we do for funsies.
the question is, where does that feeling come from? from your own time growing up, based on how your own father interacted with you? from your friends/peers? others?
i can relate. when my kids were young i didn't know what to do with them. but it's not that i didn't like spending time with them. before we had kids, working part-time so i could spend a lot of time at home was my dream. it was what i wanted. when the dream became real my inability to initiate play with the children was unexpected.
i figure it was because i had no rolemodels from my time growing up, no childhood experience that i could replicate because i grew up with a single dad who wasn't as close to me as i wanted to. every interaction was initiated by my children. it got easier as they got older because our interests became more compatible. (we could play games together that i also enjoyed, etc)
all the other stuff, taking care of them, feeding, putting them to sleep, etc. was easy because it's clear what needs to be done. and it wasn't/isn't exhausting either. i relish every interaction and moments of success where we achieve something together.
I can tell you that as you have more children the time you can spend and need to spend drops - because there’s more of them, but they also play with each other.
Three are running around yelling and I can’t even join in, as they want me to be “the base” apparently.
I can't believe I'm asking this, because it isn't even something I would remotely consider (and it is too late anyway), but, is three actually easier than two children in some ways?
I have two children and I find parenting to be utterly draining. They are 4 and 6. They are *constantly* fighting. They play together a bit, but when they do, after 5-10 minutes it leads to real fight where we need to intervene. And they still demand an enormous amount of attention.
It turns out I am one of those fathers with a personality that doesn't deal well with constant sensory overload. I was medicated for ADHD myself as a child and one of my children is AuADHD. It isn't his fault and we're trying to find ways to help him (and everyone else), but his meltdowns make life so, so hard for the whole family. He wants to control and dominate every situation, whether it is his brother or his parents.
I was wondering if the dynamics of three would have made it easier because he couldn't dominate his brother so eaily, or if that would just mean he became the isolated child.
It ... can? It really depends on the children, the dynamics, and other factors (so I'm not saying "have another kid and everything is fixed").
It does increase the network, so that if one kid doesn't want to play, the other might. Sometimes all the kids are playing together, sometimes one is off doing his own thing, sometimes there's still a meltdown.
Three might be the nadir as they outnumber you but each kid only has two other kids. But when older you likely can deal with one kid at a time and the other two play.
If it makes you feel better 4 to 6 is about the worst for "normal" kids, too, as they know that the outside world is something they have influence over but can't always control the way they want to.
My mom left the house as a kid. Dad worked and did it all during the week. Definitely felt like this was a rare thing growing up. I did spend time with my mom on the weekend though.
As a father I try and balance it out but I definitely don’t do as much as my dad did growing up.
> I don’t know who told MacRumors what (and their sourcing is just “MacRumors has learned”), but I know for a fact that it is not true that the teams working on the Vision platform have “been redistributed to other teams within Apple.”
Good to know! I thought it was a bit weird for the team to have been disbanded so abruptly. Perhaps if this aspect of the story is not correct, other aspects will turn out to have been untrue as well.
"MacRumors has learned" means "our Bloomberg shill, Mark Guesser, has made another bad prediction", every time.
Given the memes I see about how GenX are perceived in US, it seems now they have gone too far into the other direction.
It is also kind of forced. Modern industrial society wants to extract as much productivity out of workforce as possible. What that means is in 1965 one income was able to sustain a household but now we need two incomes. There is no dedicated support for kids now so fathers have to give up time and mothers have to exchange child-mother bonding time from kids to the company.
The real benefiter of this is the capitalist who can now have twice the workforce at the price of one.
How about we start paying market price to the parent who takes care of the kids irrespective of mothers or fathers ? Investing in next generation is way more important than making useless widgets faster.
My spouse and I are single-income and I still try. It's not about economic output, but rather there are things I want my son to know that I can only teach him by being present in his life.
> How about we start paying market price to the parent who takes care of the kids irrespective of mothers or fathers ? Investing in next generation is way more important than making useless widgets faster.
Considering that the current political majority in the US wants people to have more kids, this would be a really reasonable thing to do if they were serious about that.
The US already does heavily subsidize kids unless you make a brazillion dollars anyway.
Count the EITC and the child tax credit as “wife income” if you must. Also the increase in the standard deduction.
I help with my kid a lot, and I'm remote so I do it around the clock. I take contact naps, change every diaper, watch her for periods of time so my wife is free.
my wife doesn't work. and she didn't work before we had a baby. because one of our salaries was enough, so instead we work less. and again due to remote work, work has barely been top 5 in my life focus areas for the last decade.
You are by far the exception.
He might be the exception in your circles but there are many out there mimicking him, and it’s not only the Amish.
Out of close family and friends I only know of … three where they both work, and none have kids.
there's a lot of remote jobs out there
or were. tough out there rn.
Kind of forced economically but also culturally.
In the 1950s, fathers worked and paid for everything. Mothers raised the kids. This was taught in schools, girls were steered into marriage, motherhood, and housekeeping and men into vocations or college.
Let's not pretend that many women didn't go to work so they could have more, and feel like they were a more complete person. Many people just don't want to be pigeonholed into roles defined by tradition, and the 1960s were a huge rebellion against this. This wasn't some grand capitalist scheme.
It's still possible to raise a family on one professional income, if you live like most people did in the 1960s. Can you do it on minimum wage? No, but you couldn't do it then either.
Don’t imagine that it wasn’t heavily promoted by industrialites after they saw that after ww2 they could increase the labor force by 30 percent without paying more than they were before.
Everything that starts out with a few well meaning people is, especially now, immediately turned into an astroturfing campaign to fuel some specific economic or political (is there really a difference?) end.
The FIRE movement is in direct opposition to this and should be encouraged for that alone - as it reduces the pool of workers.
Have to disagree as a father. The real benefit is the father and child who are now bonding. That doesn't mean the mother can't also bond, it just means it's not one sided.
I got to spend a bit more than 2 years doing math homework 1:1 with my youngest. Now, she's moving up to honors & gets 100% without any help. I miss all that time we got to hang out, do homework, watch videos of cats, etc.
The mother's are now working. So they're bonding less. I think that's what he means not that father's are taking away mother-child bonding time.
Except if anyone bothered to read the damn article you'd see that the research showed the highly educated were more likely to have involved fathers. Those are not going to be forced as the person seems to imply.
> 1965
You may not like it, but women benefited a lot. And fought a lot to get those benefits.
Not just in terms of money. They are beaten less. When they are beaten or constantly insulted, they can leave and feed themselves.
The benefit comes from women being able to work, not from each household needing two incomes to raise kids. When a woman needs two incomes to raise her kids that means there is still a significant obstacle to leaving their partner.
> The real benefiter of this is the capitalist ...
Tired old socialist rhetoric.
The real benefiter of this is the state which can now have many times the tax base at the price of none. Where women used to take care of the children and do the housekeeping those tasks are now often done by paid day care, taxed by the state and paid help, again taxed by the state. From a single tax payer a family - father, mother, two children - now supplies two tax payers and several 'downstream' tax payers.
It's hilarious how the government used Rosy the Riveter to convince women that being liberated is slaving away building death machines for the state to literally blow up all our money, while sending your kids to people who don't give two fucks for them, all while moving all that domestic stuff to the GDP so they can tax the shit out of it.
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Yes, it’s not the capitalists making trillions from the free doubling of labor supply, it’s the politicians taking their 10%…
Guess who owns the politicians!
How can you be so ignorant.
They can be in collusion and/or one and the same.
And you don’t need snidely whiplash to create an evil master plan, it can just be how everything “naturally” works out.
Its kind of shocking after having an infant myself and hearing from his grandparents how little my wife and I's fathers did. One never changed a diaper and has never cooked dinner and the other looked like he had never held a baby in his life despite having 3 kids. I can't imagine not being incredibly hands on and involved.
There’s often been a “kids are mom’s until they’re dad’s” thing going on - dads do whatever with babies and younger children but the older children get heavily involved.
Of course, 50+ years ago diaper changing was often skilled labor (as was cooking) - it’s much easier to change a modern diaper and cook a modern ready-to-make meal.
I feel there is a trend of not fully appreciating what fathers who spend less time with kids actually do. I think that's unfair, frankly. Many of them do things that contribute to the family in other ways.
What was my Dad busy doing? Focusing on his career in order to provide for his family. Doing hobbies that increased his skill set. Fixing the house to ensure we all had a nice safe place to live. Tending to the garden to keep the neighbours happy. Building ties with the community to increase our family's standing in the community and being able to call in favours in emergencies etc.
The 4 days off he had from his primary job, he worked multiple other jobs, creating multiple streams of family income.
It's so easy to view many of these things as him not tending to his family directly. That's incredibly short-sighted.
My mother appreciated very little of those things, and constantly nagged that he never did enough. She admitted many years later this was a big contributor to their divorce.
I think some modern opinions of parenting come from a very individualistic, transactional and reciprocal mindset. Eg "I spend 1 hour doing the dishes, you have to do something, today, and of equivalent value, to show you love us". What kind of foundation for a relationship is that? What happened to the power of a family?
I think you have a point: many men work hard to provide stability for their family, and are effectively sacrificing family time to provide that. This kind of hard work feels undervalued in modern parenting discourse, which seems to put most value on time directly spent with children or on direct day-to-day tasks (dishes, cooking, etc).
An example anecdote: my friend works construction. Lots of long hours of hard labor. His wife is unhappy because he doesn't do more childcare, but left unanswered is how he could do more. He can't work fewer hours or move to a new job without a giant income hit. His wife can't earn enough to offset daycare costs. They already live on a fairly thin budget. From the outside, I can see how he'd feel unappreciated.
That said though there are definitely also men who aren't doing childcare OR working hard, and they're happy to have their wife do everything.
Often there’s unsaid things that have “comparative” simple solutions - not working less but getting the wife a few hours a week “off duty” kind of things.
I agree with all you said.
When I read from article:
> The fact that richer and better-educated parents are freely choosing to pour more of their valuable time into childcare makes raising children sound practically like a “luxury good,” akin to buying a Rolex watch or a fragile Fabergé egg.
It kind of reflected an unawareness to me. Unless one crosses the threshold of wealth where they can afford full-time 24/7 nanny, the richer parents spending more time in childcare seems obvious and non-counterintuitive. It is more likely jobs that pay well also provide flexible working hours and locations so these parents can really afford to spend more time in childcare. And this would much more prevalent category then families who could afford hired help for child care.
On the other hand poorer parent with much stringent job conditions would be mentally and physically exhausted to provide much childcare.
> I think some modern opinions of parenting come from a very individualistic, transactional and reciprocal mindset. ..
I think family unit like almost every other thing in modern economy has fallen victim to financialization of society.
Strongly agree. I know so many men who are the sole provider for their families and their wives are unhappy about how things like childcare and household chores aren’t split more fairly, but they seem to have zero appreciation for the crushing burden of financially supporting a family for decades. It’s hard, stressful, and wears you down. Almost all of the stay at home moms I know get more sleep, more exercise, and more social time than their husbands do, once the kids are old enough for school.
I’ve also now watched many friends divorce, and I have to say, the wives who stayed at home seem to struggle a LOT more with the transition of now having to parent AND have a job, and the husbands mostly seem to be fine. And that’s despite them now paying a big chunk of their ex’s bills!
> but they seem to have zero appreciation for the crushing burden of financially supporting a family for decades. It’s hard, stressful, and wears you down.
Absolutely. They will though, when two parents working fully becomes a requirement instead of an option, as we are seeing in many HCOL areas. Or even, as many wish, to be the primary earner and the man stay at home.
In fact, the burden on the sole earner as you point out, is /increasing/ during this transition - costs are rising due to the expectation that two people will contribute financially to the mortgage and other expenses. Another issue that women don't tend to appreciate.
At that point, neither parent can catch a break, and the family and children suffer.
But this equality of opportunity is exactly what women fought extremely hard for. It's a shame that marriage and the kids are sometimes the victims of the side effects.
(I'm gay fwiw and not a misogynist. I do root for women's rights but not blindly. Demanding massive societal change comes with responsibilities)
Second sibling born - turns out I didn't get to be the parent, I get to look after the parents. I'm tired, exhausted, utterly miserable, barely scraping by. All those fancy ideals I thought old age provided for don't exist. Nursing homes? Hah, that's $340 a day up here in the middle of nowhere. I ain't making that a day. I get to do it myself.
I wonder what percentage of folks are now stuck in caretaking instead of raising their own families themselves. I basically predict my family line is extinct after my generation.